Hard Edges on mesh
polycounter lvl 2
Been having trouble with a mesh I'm working on and can't get my head around it and seem to have hard edges over parts of my mesh
as well as having trouble with baking high poly onto round objects
Google Drive LINK
Replies
Hi! You will need sufficient texture resolution for edges to get picked up nicely, especially with tight edges like here.
To optimize the use of texture space, break down the asset first.
For large areas like wall and roof you can use tiling textures, especially here where edges seem to be covered by meshes.
Parts like trims or frames could be mapped to tiling strips on your texture atlas (search term trim sheet).
Repeating elements (torch grating, spikes) are ideal to reuse texture space. An easy way to achieve this, is use of instances. Ideally offset instances UVs by 1 to avoid issues when baking from 1 highpoly (e.g. only one highpoly spike) or using world aligned patterns during texturing.
You could also add some more pronounced bevels to the highpolys to ensure they get picked up in the normalmap. Make some tests to find good balance.
Regarding your lowpoly. Iirc you have lots UV splits at edges with steep angles, but the edges are shaded smooth. Consider making those hard edges to have the normal map compensate less for the lowpolys shading.
Aligning UV borders to pixel grid will reduce potential of seams showing.
With individually textured parts, ensure invisible faces don't waste texture space, either by removing geometry or modifying UVs.
Regarding the rounded elements, that's to be expected when the difference between low and highpoly is to great. Either increase lowpoly geometry, or map the UV strip to a trim.
Check out some of the stickied threads on the forum (i think one was something like "who put the waviness in my normalmap"), as well as the wiki.
Much success!
I'm not quite sure what you mean by aligning UV borders to pixel grid is that taking any curved or circular UVs and straightening them out
Yep, try to straighten your UVs as much as possible. Obviously some UVs will be wildly distorted more than others, but since this geo is fairly straight in nature, it should be fine.
https://polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map/p1 this should help with the second issue.
the first one feels like you didnt bake with the same mesh and hard edges as you show to preview. or if you did, you didnt split uvs on the hard edges? tho i think this would look a little different
but tbh with geo and resolution like this, you might have more luck with trimsheets rather than baking a high to lowpoly